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1answer
44 views

How does an earthen pot keep water cool?

I understand that evaporative cooling takes place thanks to small pores contained in the pot and that allow some water to go through and evaporate. However I couldn't understand clearly whether water ...
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0answers
27 views

Can I maintain a constant relative humidity using saturated salt solution, at greater than atmospheric pressure? [migrated]

At atmospheric pressure and between temperatures of $\sim 0$ to $100^\circ C$, well known relationships between established humidity and given saturated salt solution are available. I.e. ASTM E104 ...
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0answers
34 views

How can I interpret negative values of potential evapotranspiration?

If I extract Potential Evaporation (PET, W/m$^2$) from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), climate reanalysis data (downloadable as netCDF files here), there are some negative ...
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0answers
49 views

Water evaporation

It is known that molecules at the surface are strongly attached to each other (more attraction less repulsion) than those within the bulk attraction and repulsion are balanced). This is the molecular ...
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2answers
237 views

Stripeless cleaning of windows

Cross post: http://chemistry.stackexchange.com/q/4377/22 Last week I was discussing with a friend how we thought the stripeless cleaning of windows is achieved when using a cleaner like Windex ...
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3answers
432 views

What's the surface area of a liquid? How does evaporation increase if the surface area of a liquid is increased?

Wikipedia says that a substance that has a larger surface area will evaporate faster, as there are more surface molecules that are able to escape. I think the rate of evaporation should decrease as ...
2
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0answers
30 views

Will humid air mitigate airborn dust due to neutralization of static electricity?

I have came to understand that humid air will help prevent electrostatic forces that can propel dust and cause it to cling to surfaces. My first question: is this above statement true? If the answer ...
2
votes
1answer
151 views

Can traditional steam (water vapour) exist in a vacuum?

Can steam (water vapour) exist in a vacuum, and if so does it look and behave the same as in air? Let's assume the actual case is a kettle boiling in a vacuum. Note that I'm talking about a gas-less ...
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3answers
107 views

How to accurately explain evaporative cooling?

I am trying to clearly express in one or two sentences how increased evapotranspiration could cool a region. The audience is educated but non-scientific. Is it accurate to say that the water vapor ...
3
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1answer
107 views

How would one calculate the amount of water contained in a cloud?

So I was looking out the sky one day and I wondered how I would go about calculating how much water was contained in a cloud. I figured the following simple outline 1) We need to roughly know how big ...
4
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3answers
225 views

atmospheric phenomenon? What causes condensation trails to converge?

This air plane just caught my eye. Two contrails apparently are flowing backward, slightly off-centered and then ultimately converge, giving the overall shape of a very narrow rhomboid parallelogram, ...
3
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1answer
173 views

Why is there a hiss sound when water falls on a hot surface?

Why is there a hiss sound when water falls on a hot surface? I have searched a lot, asked my teachers but none of them seem to give me the logical answer to it.
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2answers
339 views

Why can't I evaporate water without wind, just heat? (not boiling,evaporating!) Or can I?

So here is the thing, I searched all over the internet for this but all the sources say that I need wind because the process of evaporation goes as follow: Water particles at the top layer with ...
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2answers
256 views

Time to establish saturated vapour pressure above liquid

Thought experiment - a liquid is in a closed container in equilibrium with its vapour, and then suddenly all the vapour is pumped away. Switch off the pump so that instantaneosuly there is no vapour ...
2
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1answer
595 views

Heat of vaporization of water - dependence on relative humidity?

Does the heat of vaporization of water depend strongly on the relative humidity of the gas into which it evaporates? Some context: If we want to calculate the dew point of water, we find the ...
3
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2answers
107 views

What would make the bottom of my cocktail glass develop a fractured pattern like this?

I left out the remnants of my Long Island Iced Tea. This was a mixture of various liquors, lemon juice, Splenda, and water from the melted ice. It was left on my kitchen counter for several days: ...
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2answers
1k views

How to calculate the evaporative cooling rate needed to protect a house from forest fire

Recently in our area there has been a large forest fire and I've been looking into home defense from such things. I am not a physicist - but can do some basic math. I was wondering how I could ...
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1answer
154 views

Hygiene thermodynamics 2

Two kinda related questions here: Is evaporation rate and temperature difference related? There is an experiment of pouring cup of hot water out the window during winter. The water evaporates almost ...
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4answers
618 views

Sauna thermodynamics

Why does it get hotter (feel hotter) in a sauna when one pours water over the hot stones? Wikipedia says that the water condenses onto the skin, but the actual air humidity is so low that I doubt ...